Big blind special: Snowboarder Adam ‘Wildcard’ Nicks is back in the action after losing his eye
Daniel Carberry/Courtesy image
Watching TV in a University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point dorm room, Dom Swangstu called his friend Adam Nicks “The Wildcard” one day and all their friends had a chuckle of how fitting of a nickname it was.
Nicks was the wildcard of their crew, a small group of snowboarders who took every chance they could to break away from class and head up to the rolling slopes of the Midwest.
But when snowboarding legend Halldor Helgason called Nicks that same name a second time, not knowing he had already been called it once before, it was no longer funny. It was fate. The nickname stuck and Nicks has been called that ever since.
The name fits Nicks’ snowboarding style, which mimics his general lifestyle. You never know what to expect from him, but whatever he brings, it’s going to be spectacular.
“Any city he’s lived in you hear stories about Wildcard,” said his friend Mitch Holtz, who was part of that crew at Stevens Point.
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At Stevens Point, a memorable story involving Nicks occurred while he was snowboarding on St. Patrick’s Day in 2018. He stomped a massive backflip over a crowd of people and, upon landing, was immediately approached by a knife wielding man who cut the sleeves off his favorite hoodie without warning or permission.
It was the ultimate honor for a Stevens Point snowboarder — getting your sleeves cut off at Granite Peak ski area on St. Patrick’s Day means you were being patched in to the Midwest chapter of the Ravinos. That’s the 50-something year old ski/snowboard club’s original chapter, the place it all started.
Before the Ravinos became known by skiers around the country for performing massive backflips in Vail on St. Patrick’s Day, it was a small ski club in Wisconsin on Rib Mountain (now Granite Peak). The club’s founder, Jeff Van Tassel, moved out to Vail in the ’70s and started a Rocky Mountain Chapter, and the rest is history.
Nicks wore his Ravinos patch with pride, moving up to Mt. Bohemia, a lake-effect powder-packed haven once eyed for purchase by Vail Resorts because it rides more like a Rocky Mountain resort than an Upper Michigan enclave.
At Bohemia, Nicks became known as the snowboarder who wore the cotton hoodie with the Ravinos patch that would get wet and freeze stiff at the frigid resort. He honed his skills at Bohemia and it quickly became apparent he was destined for bigger things — bigger mountains, bigger jumps, and bigger airs off those jumps.
Nicks had earned an invite to Superpark 21 at Mammoth Mountain in California in 2017 and attempted a triple rodeo 1260 during an early session. Later that evening Nicks saw Helgason, who was wearing a chandelier that had been removed from the ceiling of a local establishment at the time, and complimented him on his unusual attire. Helgason, who may have had cards on the mind as that year’s Superpark event was employing a playing cards theme, asked Nicks if he was the kid who attempted the triple. Nicks confirmed it was him, and Helgason said those fateful words: “You’re a wildcard, man.”
From that day forward he was no longer known as Nicks.
Joker’s wild
Wildcard continued to travel around the West Coast, attending top-level snowboard camps and riding with pros like Helgason. He earned another invite to Superpark 22 in 2019 at Crystal Mountain in Washington and performed a backflip onto a rail, making the prestigious event’s even more prestigious highlight reel.
Things were going well. After Superpark 22 Wildcard went back down to Mammoth and attended a training came where he was working on a quadruple backflip and a never-attempted frontflip into 180 into double backflip. It was an odd trick that required a mid-air twist which would have certainly solidified his name in the annals of snowboarding history had he been able to pull it off in competition.
Following the Mammoth training camp, Wildcard’s budding career as a professional snowboarder was so close he could feel its spray as he chased it with all his speed. He went back home to Illinois to celebrate with some friends, where another one of those crazy Wildcard stories take place. But this story did not have a happy ending.
The wild card in a game of poker is often the joker, and Wildcard was embodying that persona during his night out at the bar. He was laughing, making wisecracks, back-slapping and showing off to those who were in his circle. At one point he performed a backflip off the tavern’s fireplace and might have knocked someone’s drink over in the process.
And then came the moment that would change his life forever. From out of nowhere, with no warning, he said he felt a bottle smash against his head, gashing him open and causing massive lacerations to his scalp and face.
He went in for surgery and when he woke up, the doctor told him he probably wouldn’t ever see out of his right eye again, which bore the brunt of the shattered glass.
“I did a bunch of surgeries, but I just never regained vision,” he said.
His left eye wasn’t doing so well, either.
“I couldn’t go outside during the day for like 6 months after it happened, because every time I’d go out in the sun my eyes would start watering uncontrollably,” he said. “My brain just hadn’t adjusted.”
When he tried to get back on his snowboard, he realized his depth perception had been all but ruined, and he was back to near-beginner levels of snowboarding skill.
That’s when depression started to set in.
“I was totally broke and I couldn’t snowboard,” he said. “Plus there was a whole insurance dispute and it took like a year and a half to get an artificial eye.”
Someone who he thought was his friend had set up a GoFundMe for him, which raised nearly $2,000, but then that person ran off with the money.
“I was on top of the world and then I felt like I just got taken back to zero really quick,” he said. “My whole identity was wrapped up in trying to be a pro snowboarder and I was just so bummed.”
Bad beat
After reaching the depths of a low that he never thought he would experience in life, Wildcard started to climb out of his depression with little help from his friends.
“Z Griff from the Rocky Mountain Ravinos held a little fundraiser for me and was able to send me a few hundred bucks,” he said. “That meant a lot.”
Wildcard’s friend Mitch Holtz, one of the Stevens Point snowboarders who was there the first time Nicks was ever called Wildcard, was also thinking a lot about what might help his friend get back to his former self. Holtz was also at Superpark 22 when Wildcard made the highlight reel.
“It was so tough,” Holtz said. “He was going through a hard time just thinking that he wasn’t going to be able to snowboard at all.”
Holtz thought a lot about what might help his friend relearn some of his skills, and his thoughts drifted to their early days on their snowboards. In developing the skills that would one day take them to the Superpark events, Holtz and Wildcard would take shavings from the ice rink in Mosinee, Wisconsin, and set up park features using easily accessible implements, like corrugated pipes and PVC rails.
“We called it the Motown Bro Down,” Holtz said, referencing the name locals often use for Mosinee.
Thinking about those days, Holtz had an idea.
“I called him up and said you can’t see as well as before, but snowboarding is a lot about feel too,” Holtz said. “Riding rails, you can feel it under your feet, especially when it’s a corrugated tube.”
Even though Holtz was living in Colorado at the time, he suggested they get back together for a Motown Bro Down, just like old times.
“I told him it would be low consequence, we’re not at a resort, it was just the homies,” Holtz said.
Wildcard decided to join and just as Holtz predicted, he felt the corrugated tube under his feet and his sense of touch started to compensate for what he had lost in his sense of sight.
“That day was super fun, just watching him get back into snowboarding,” Holtz said.
Wildcard said it was a turning point for him.
“I had a really good sesh, was landing all my tricks, just feeling super good,” he said.
A few months later, Wildcard was passing through Colorado and paid a visit to Holtz, who was living in Summit County.
“He said you should just live here,” Wildcard said. “I said that sounds great to me.”
Raising the stakes
The next season Wildcard started getting back into snowboarding and pushing his boundaries. He started riding big mountain terrain and even entered into some competitive freeride events.
Another season went by and Wildcard was looking more like his old self. The itch of the backflip started to come back and he tried a few flips off some easy jumps and was able to land them.
Zach “Z Griff” Griffin, the Ravinos member who held the fundraiser for Wildcard after he lost his eye, began to take notice of his rapidly improving skills.
“I got this idea that it would be cool to see him become a Rocky Mountain Ravinos, since he was already a Midwest patch,” Z Griff said.
Z Griff vouched for Wildcard to attempt a backflip off a natural feature on Vail Mountain called the “Wailer,” a feat which, if performed on St. Patrick’s Day, would earn him a patch in the Rocky Mountain Chapter of Ravinos. Wildcard loved the idea, but he had no idea what he was in for.
“I didn’t even know where the Wailer was,” he said. “We rolled up to it to see it and I’m like ‘Damn, I don’t even want to straight air that thing.'”
The fight or flight instinct came to him, and he was leaning toward the latter.
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“I was like ‘Not that many people have seen me here yet, I can just leave,'” he said. “But I’ve kind of already committed myself to being here.”
He tried a straight air with no flip and it went OK, so he decided to try a flip.
“I did a butt buster on my first backflip attempt,” he said. “And I’m kind of glad I did, I was going too fast.”
On his second flip attempt, he got his feet down on the ground, but he washed out on the Wailer’s steep runout, again sliding on his backside.
After four or five more attempts, he was still far from riding away clean.
And then the crowd started chanting “Wildcard, Wildcard.”
“That hyped me up for sure,” he said.
But the light was flat, the landing was hard and slick, and his depth perception just wasn’t where he needed it to be.
After 3 p.m. rolled around, the Ravinos were ready to call it a day. But Wildcard felt he might have one more trick up his sleeve.
“I had the idea to try it without my goggles,” he said.
It was his seventh attempt on the day, and he landed it and rode away clean. The Ravinos exploded in celebration, tackling him in the landing.
“It was one of the best moments of my life,” he said.
Turn and burn
The Wailer backflip brought about a familiar feeling in Wildcard, the feeling of relief.
The last time he had felt it, it had come to him in a much different way.
“I had been holding all this anger and self-doubt, wondering if it was my fault that this guy did this to me, wondering what I could have done differently,” he said. “I had never said one word to the guy in my life, never looked at him that night, but there was something about me he decided he did not like.”
Those feelings had been with Wildcard for years after the incident. He’d see himself in the mirror with his messed up eye and he knew others were probably having the same reaction.
“I would get weird looks from people from time to time and I just had to accept it is what it is,” he said.
After a while, he started to like that person in the mirror again, maybe even more than the previous reflection.
“Before, I was this cool snowboarder dude, good shape, good looking,” he said. “But after this happened, I had to make up for it in my personality and become a better person.”
But there was still one thing holding him back — the resentment he felt toward his tormentor — until finally, one day, he allowed that weight to be lifted from his shoulders.
“I just realized that holding a grudge is really just you poisoning yourself,” he said. “Where if you just let it go, you’ll be free. You just gotta forgive and forget.”
